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Forum rules

* This subforum is for the general discussion of video game soundtracks, and the uploading of emulated-game music formats, including, but not limited to SPC, SNSF, NSF, GBS, PSFs, USFs, GSFs, etc. as well as the respective format's mini*sf extension and files (*sflibs, etc.) required by the format are allowed to be posted here.

* Individual songs can be uploaded as-is, but full soundtracks should ideally be compressed either via .rar, .zip or .7z, or they will be subject to deletion. Subtune-based formats including, but not limited to NSF, GBS, SID, etc do not need to compressed due the nature of their small given size and direct portability.

* Do not upload anything that could be in violation of American copyright laws. Yes, they're silly, arcane, and draconian, but we'd really rather not have to deal with their over-zealous enforcers. This includes links to such files.

* No flaming, no direct attacks against other members, and no spamming. Such activity will not be tolerated. Users who fail to respect other member's rights will be warned, banned or any other action will be taken as required.

* The SNESMusic staff reserve the right to ban users, remove posted content not limited to illegal material, offensive content or any other content at their discretion.

Hello! I'm new to these forums, and I look forward to meeting up with some like-minded people who enjoy .SPCs like myself.

I've always been captivated with limitations in art...It must be something about purposely defining your boundaries that really makes some people push their creative limits. I've always shied away from programs like Photoshop and FL Studio, while flocking to MS Paint and OpenMPT. And it was just recently that I began to compose .SPC-like music in OpenMPT. You can find some examples of my work on my SoundCloud account in a rough chronological order, though some new stuff got bumped to the bottom for some reason...Anyways, onto business....

So far, how am I holding up well musically? Do my songs show improvement? What should I improve on? Can you detect a growing style or am I still all over the place? Should I use different samples? Less instruments? I have a lot of questions about my music...I've shown much of it to my friends, but they really haven't been able to give me a harsh, critical viewpoint on it as they don't compose .SPC music themselves. If anyone needs to, I can PM them one of my precious .IT files so that they can take a look "under the hood" and see what I should change.

Secondly, I have a question about obtaining some good samples. Currently, I'm using samples entirely from my .SPC collection on my hard drive. I'm using SPCTool to extract the samples, but this is a long process. Is there an easier way to get .SPC Samples without sacrificing the amount of GUI I've become accustomed to using? SPCTool crashes quite often for me, and I'm currently looking for a good GUI-based program that can help me extract samples.

Another thing...if I wanted to create my own samples with SNES-quality, how would I do this? I'm familiar with tools such as BRRTool but I cannot get them to work on my 64-Bit Windows 8 for the life of me...they're just too old. It would be nice if I could use my own instruments and simply downsample them with something that has a little bit more control than OpenMPT's downsampling functions. I'm familiar with using Viena Soundfont Studio and Audacity, but would these be of any help?

Next...Is there any way to make GB/GBA-style chiptune samples in external programs and then convert them to .WAV files? I have a VSTi plug-in for OpenMPT called PooBoy2 that can generate primative waveforms, but I can't export them as .WAVs. My final goal of music composition is to create music that has a nice balance of orchestral-style instruments and chiptune ones. Kind of like the music of Spiral Knights or Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (beautiful song by the way).

To wrap things up, I have one last question. I'm currently in the process of designing and planning my own game, "Super Dragonsin Saga". In it, I plan to create a strong balance between visuals and audio, despite having some strong limitations in the latter. For example, in most of my songs, you'll notice that I have a cymbal/hi-hat that plays throughout the entire song. This is done purposely, as I want to achieve an effect where the hi-hat would only play while the character is moving. To implement this, I would load an .IT file into Python and increase/decrease the volume of individual channels at runtime. Also, I want to implement beat-based battles that involve attacking rhythmically like in Mother 3's transfixing battle system. Is something like this possible? Was it possible on the SNES? Should I give up and just use silly MIDI files? I'm just beginning at programming, so I'm not even sure how I'd go about parsing an .IT file or any of that rubbish. :X

Hey, I'm a real SNES musician! I've even made music for real SNES games! So it's a good thing you stopped by here.

As long as you're not going too large in the sample department, your music should be real SNES music. I know of a sound driver by mukunda called SNESMod that takes .it files and converts them to .spc. I'd be glad to assist in the conversion process, and that might actually make your theoretical game a reality with some 65C816 magic.

Samples can be practically anything, as long as you're willing to fool around with the sample and do chopping and/or quality reduction. Loop points should be divisible by 16 (as a BRR block is 16... er... "samples"), and this is my key piece of advice: make sure the total length is not over 100,000. Otherwise, that's almost a guaranteed memory overflow right there on the SPC700 end. Vienna and Audacity would help you in the quality reduction process (although I use Schism Tracker and just simply do that internally).

I'm not as experienced in chip waveforms... actually, As a matter of fact... I have actually raw imported special files that contain nothing but hex numbers I've entered and used those as samples. But you want .wav files. I can tell you're probably not using a Mac, otherwise I'd recommend Wiretap Pro (which is what I use in this case).

For dynamic music, I'd recommend creating your own sound driver. You can do beat-based battles perfectly fine on SNESMod (Thanks to a "cue" feature that you program on the tracker end. Then the SNES can read the cues on request.). Actually, I know of one that I believe was able to do that, but the game is unfinished and unreleased.

For individual channels fading in and out... that requires SPC700 ASM on the grounds that I know SNESMod doesn't have that feature right out the gate. You could always create a custom sound driver as well.

Anyways... I'd be glad to assist in converting over the music for real. I've been using that sound driver for a good four years at the very least.

_________________Just consider me your friendly SPC dumper. Also a bit of a perfectionist (though not too literally)... I make sure my dumps are at the first note. I might even hack away the SFX if needed.

Want a music modifier for a particular SNES game? All you need to do is ask via PM (or you can check out the Music Modifiers topic and post there) and I'll be on the job. ^_^

On my end, the only custom feature I would have to add to SNESMod (and I know some SPC700 assembly to do the job, because I've fooled around with the sound driver myself) to satisfy what you're going for is an individual channel volume set command (or a individual channel volume fade command). Other than that, the beat-based part of what you're going for is already in SNESMod as long as you add SF1 commands to your .it files to indicate a beat.

_________________Just consider me your friendly SPC dumper. Also a bit of a perfectionist (though not too literally)... I make sure my dumps are at the first note. I might even hack away the SFX if needed.

Want a music modifier for a particular SNES game? All you need to do is ask via PM (or you can check out the Music Modifiers topic and post there) and I'll be on the job. ^_^

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